Stress Misassignment in the Pronunciation of English by Arabic-speaking Learners: Erratic Practice or Crosslinguistic Influence?

The role of L1 interference in English stress assignment produced by Arabic-speaking EFL learners has received little research attention. This study aims to investigate whether faulty stress assignment by Arab learners is arbitrary or systematic. It also attempts to discover a linkage, if any, between Arabic phonotactic rules of stress placement and stress misplacement in English by Saudi learners. 120 learners from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University were randomly chosen from 3 different levels of English proficiency (lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, advanced); they were asked to pronounce 72 stimulus words that covered all morpho-syllabic word structures that the learners often mispronounced. The recordings were analysed using WASP spectrogram software and also by two independent raters. Results strongly indicated that crosslinguistic influence may have caused the learners to consistently a) place the stress on a specific syllable in a word even when this word has multiple stress assignments with a difference in meaning, b) stress the second item in a compound noun instead of the first, c) place the stress on the penultimate syllable of most polysyllabic words, d) place the stress on the second syllable of contracted negative auxiliary verbs , and e) misplace stress irrespective of their level of English proficiency.

L2 Acquisition of a Complex Stress Pattern: UG-Constrained Learning Paths in Khalkha Mongolian

This paper examines second language (L2) acquisition of stress in Khalkha Mongolian, which is one of the few Default-to-Opposite Edge stress systems of the world, and as such, demonstrates “conflicting directionality” regarding stress assignment, resulting in the leftmost edge of a word being more prominent in certain words and the rightmost edge in certain others. Given the additional fact that the language exhibits Non-finality effects, and that, unlike English, codas are not moraic, its acquisition presents unique difficulties and challenges for English-speaking learners of the language. Many of these challenges potentially lead these learners to make Universal Grammar (UG)-unconstrained (but cognitively reasonable) assumptions about how the phonology of Mongolian works, especially since the learners do not have all the Mongolian data available to them all at once. The learning scenario here, thus, provides unique opportunities to investigate whether L2 phonologies are constrained by the options made available by UG. The findings of a semi-controlled production experiment indicate that although learners do not necessarily converge on the prosodic representations employed by native speakers of the L2 (i.e., footless intonational prominence, at least for the leftmost/default edge ‘stress’), and although certain changes to the grammar are very difficult to implement, such as switching from moraic codas to non-moraic codas, the learners nevertheless demonstrate a stage-like behavior where each step exhibits the parameter settings employed by a natural language, one that is neither like the L2 nor the L1. Conversely, despite the input leading them to do so, learners do not entertain UG-unconstrained prosodic representations, such as End-Rule-Middle or End-Rule-Variable; End-Rule is set either to Right or Left, as is expected in a system constrained by the options made available by UG. We conclude that the hypothesis space for interlanguage phonologies is determined by UG.

Lexical stress assignment preferences in L2 German

Assigning stress to the appropriate syllable is consequential for being understood. Despite the importance, second language (L2) learners’ stress assignment is often incorrect, being affected by their first language (L1). Beyond the L1, learners’ lexical stress assignment may depend on analogy with other words in their lexicon. The current study investigates the respective roles of the L1 (English, French) and analogy in L2 German lexical stress assignment. Because English, like German, has variable stress assignment and French does not, participants included English- and French-speaking German L2 learners who assigned stress to German nonsense words in a perceptual preference and a production task. Results suggest a role of the L1, with English-speaking German L2 learners performing more like L1 German speakers. While French-speaking German L2 learners’ performance could not be predicted by other factors, L2 German proficiency and the ability to produce analogous words were predictive of English-speaking German L2 learners’ production performance.

Morphology-phonology interplay in lexical stress assignment: Ichishkiin Sɨnwit

This paper presents a novel analysis of the stress system of Ichishkiin Sɨnwit (Sahaptian). Ichishkiin Sɨnwit has been previously analyzed as a unique example of a stress system requiring a ranking of the Affix Faithfulness constraints over the Root Faithfulness constraints. I argue, however, that such idiosyncratic stress mechanisms are not necessary. Instead, I propose that accent assignment is cyclic: Underlying accent in the outermost derivational layer within the relevant domain wins. A central role in this analysis belongs to (i) the underlying specification of morphemes for accent, and to (ii) morpho-prosodic domains. The current proposal additionally offers an insight into the role of morpho-prosodic domains in the hiatus resolution strategies.

Nominal Gender in Coptic Egyptian

Summary The interdisciplinary research (philology, typology, morphology, phonology) presented here explores the role of gender in the meaning and morphology of Coptic nouns. Coptic has a predominantly grammatical gender system, albeit with a niche for semantically based gender assignment. The gender system marks a three-way semantic contrast between a [male] versus a [female] versus an [unspecified] gender value, even where the morphology draws only a two-way distinction between grammatical masculine and feminine gender. By integrating quantitative data and morphophonological analysis, we shall argue that masculine gender is morphologically unmarked. Although no discrete morpheme can be identified, feminine gender is always morphologically marked on nouns. Masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished in terms of their templatic structure, which interacts in complex ways with vowel distributions, stress assignment, and noun class.

Arguments for a Privative L Tone in Northern Tepehuan

This paper proposes that Northern Tepehuan is a tonal language with just one lexical tone 'low tone' and is therefore a privative tonal system. L tone is sufficient to explain the pitch contrasts in the language and also necessary to explain the "inconsistencies" of stress assignment. Stress is normally predictable from the size of the word, from syllable-weight, and is cued by a H* intonational tone. Nonetheless, in words that do not obey the Stress-to-Weight constraint, it could be argued that stress is displaced from the heavy syllable by virtue of a high-ranked *Align(Head/Low) constraint that prohibits the placement of stress on a syllable with a lexical L. The L tone also explains why the H* intonational tone can be displaced from stressed syllables.

Weight gradience and stress in Portuguese

This paper examines the role of weight in stress assignment in the Portuguese lexicon, and proposes a probabilistic approach to stress. I show that weight effects are gradient and monotonically weaken as we move away from the right edge of the word. Such effects depend on the position of a syllable in the word as well as the number of segments the syllable contains. The probabilistic model proposed in this paper is based on a single predictor, namely, weight, and yields more accurate results than a categorical analysis, where weight is treated as binary. Finally, I discuss implications for the grammar of Portuguese.

Word Stress in Languages of the Caucasus

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the stress systems in Abkhaz-Adyghean/North-West Caucasian, Nakh-Dagestanian/North-East Caucasian, and Kartvelian/South-Caucasian languages, as well as the larger Indo-European languages of the area, Ossetic (Iron and Digoron) and Armenian. First, it addresses the so-called free stress languages, in which stress placement is not restricted to particular syllables/syllable types or morphemes, and the fixed stress languages, in which stress always targets a syllable in a certain position, counting from the left or right edge of a word. Next, quantity-sensitive stress systems are considered, in which stress is found on the heavier syllable within a given domain, such as a whole word or a part of it (a so-called stress window). Further, the chapter discusses languages in which stress assignment is morphologically conditioned. After the chapter introduces this classification of stress systems, it addresses the more complex cases that do not (fully) fit into it, notably the stress systems of Abkhaz-Adyghean and some of the Nakh-Dagestanian languages. Finally, the chapter considers underdescribed stress systems and languages for which conflicting descriptions have been proposed. The chapter closes with an overview of the available instrumental studies. Overall, the aim of the current chapter is to highlight the impressive diversity that the languages of the Caucasus exhibit in the realm of word stress and emphasize the need for further research in the area, both instrumental and theoretical.

Suprasegmental Features of Indonesian Students’ English Pronunciation and the Pedagogical Implication

This minor study aims at describing learners’ features of pronunciation in terms of their suprasegmental aspects found in their speech. Students were asked to read aloud a text entitled The Gorilla Joke from the © BBC British Council 2006. Students oral narrations were then analysed in terms of their intonation pattern and stress assignment in sentence level. A metrical analysis was also used to show how students produced their speech rhythm. The result of the analysis shows that given the same text to read students may produce various combination of intonation patterns. Students also misplaced stress within the syllables or assigned no stress at all. Based on the metrical phonology analysis, learners did not assign foot timely based on the timing units in connected speeches. The speech production is more like a broken speech. Students also neglected the morphophonemics rules in which they did not produce the appropriate allomorphs [t], [d], and [id] in the past participle words. These features bring about some pedagogical implication. Keywords: student’ pronunciation features, suprasegmental aspects

Correspondence between XPs and Phonological Phrases

Bresnan (1971, 1972) establishes an interaction between stress assignment and syntactic movement. We are interested in a restriction on this interaction. We argue that this restriction shows that the constraint STRESS-XP needs to be part of the syntax-prosody mapping and that it needs to be a restriction on a correspondence relation between syntactic XPs and phonological phrases. (A second constraint on the correspondence relation is either WRAP-XP or MATCH-XP.) In the course of our argument, we analyze Bresnan’s interaction between stress assignment and movement within an account in which Internal Merge induces reconstruction effects at both LF and PF.